Many of today's gaming casinos and other entertainment locations feature different single and multi-player gaming systems such as slot machines and video poker machines. The gaming machines may include a number of hardware and software components to provide a wide variety of game types and game playing capabilities. Exemplary hardware components may include bill validators, coin acceptors, card readers, keypads, buttons, levers, touch screens, coin hoppers, ticket printers, player tracking units and the like. Software components may include, for example, boot and initialization routines, various game play programs and subroutines, credit and payout routines, image and audio generation programs, various component modules and a random or pseudo-random number generator, among others.
Gaming machines are highly regulated to ensure fairness. In many cases, gaming machines may be operable to dispense monetary awards of a large amount of money. Accordingly, access to gaming machines is often carefully controlled. For example, in some jurisdictions, routine maintenance requires that extra personal (e.g., gaming control personal) be notified in advance and be in attendance during such maintenance. Additionally, gaming machines may have hardware and software architectures that differ significantly from those of general-purpose computers (PCs), even though both gaming machines and PCs employ microprocessors to control a variety of devices. For example, gaming machines may have more stringent security requirements and fault tolerance requirements. Additionally, gaming machines generally operate in harsher environments as compared with PCs.
In many casinos and other entertainment locations, the gaming machines may be networked to one or more devices that monitor the functions of the gaming machines during operation. For example, a system may monitor and regulate the amount of money received by a gaming machine and the amount of money paid out by the gaming machine. The system may also monitor and regulate multi-player gaming, pooling of player wagers, etc. on the gaming machine. For example, networking and/or control software may be used to regulate game performance across all players, such as graphics that allows each player to participate in the same scene in the game. Networking and/or control software may be used to unify separate gaming machines such that the multi-player gaming may appear as one game to the system. Networking may also allow two or more gaming machines to be combined under the same model, which allows several players to play the same game, while at different gaming machines.